Well the Daleks have been converting people into Daleks for years, see Bad Wolf and Revelation of the Daleks, and in terms of mind controlled humans as puppets they were using robomen as far back as their second story, and the nanogene'd humans here are just an extension of that. As for actually assimilating someone into an actual Dalek, this has usually only happend in extreme circumstances, and it must be noted as well that the Daleks who assimilated Oswin were, most likely, loony tunes!

The Daleks have been shown before to lobotomize humans to turn them into half robot slaves, just the method is different.
And them using humand gentic material to make new Daleks isn't new either, except here they apparently lobotomized (or so they thought), a human and stuck at least her brain into a Dalek shell.

As many times as the Doctor went back into the Dalek's past to try & stop/prevent them, it's possible he pushed them to be more evil than dangerous.

Sure, they were created to be a master race of sorts, but the Doctor's interventions may have made a bad situation worse.

The Borg weren't evil, just single minded in their need to assimilate others.

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Its a good point. The Daleks would still have been fairly militant, just going by their speech near the end of 'Genesis', plus their war with the Movellans, and the Humans. Otoh, did their encounters with te Doctor, and the Timelords motivate them to develop time travel, the time destructor, and various other super weapons?

As many times as the Doctor went back into the Dalek's past to try & stop/prevent them, it's possible he pushed them to be more evil than dangerous.

Sure, they were created to be a master race of sorts, but the Doctor's interventions may have made a bad situation worse.

The Borg weren't evil, just single minded in their need to assimilate others.

Click to expand...

Its a good point. The Daleks would still have been fairly militant, just going by their speech near the end of 'Genesis', plus their war with the Movellans, and the Humans. Otoh, did their encounters with te Doctor, and the Timelords motivate them to develop time travel, the time destructor, and various other super weapons?

Click to expand...

I would say, it's very likely a good percentage of their advancement in Technology was in response to The Doctor or The Time Lords defeating them, and almost certainly Time Travel is one of them, since that's The Gillefreyans "Thing"

And that was the main point of the episode. They specifically stated the Doctor is the reason they've become such a massive threat. So now that they have no recollection of the Doctor, and have already begun trying to form some kind of clearly democratically-implied government, perhaps they're on a road to becoming a more reasonable and less universe-destroying race.

Which is exactly why the question "Doctor who?" must never be answered since we now know who's asking the question (and I have a feeling a few other universal threats are going to be asking it before the series is over).

Of course, now they're curious about who the Doctor is. They've also shown that when they put their collective minds to it, they can scoop up the Doctor and take him anywhere they want. So why not to a location that forces him to answer their question?

Sorry, 27 pages is alot to trawl through, forgive me if this has been asked/answered before...

So the Daleks now Assimilate rather than Exterminate? They've ripped off the Borg?

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Well, there's something of a precedent in the OldWho story Revelation Of The Daleks from 1985, where humans meant to be in suspended animation were being Dalekised on the sly. Not that assimilation hasn't been a staple of fantasy fiction for centuries, anyway. (Zombies, werewolves, vampires etc.)

As many times as the Doctor went back into the Dalek's past to try & stop/prevent them, it's possible he pushed them to be more evil than dangerous.

Sure, they were created to be a master race of sorts, but the Doctor's interventions may have made a bad situation worse.

The Borg weren't evil, just single minded in their need to assimilate others.

Click to expand...

Its a good point. The Daleks would still have been fairly militant, just going by their speech near the end of 'Genesis', plus their war with the Movellans, and the Humans. Otoh, did their encounters with te Doctor, and the Timelords motivate them to develop time travel, the time destructor, and various other super weapons?

Click to expand...

I would say, it's very likely a good percentage of their advancement in Technology was in response to The Doctor or The Time Lords defeating them, and almost certainly Time Travel is one of them, since that's The Gillefreyans "Thing"

Click to expand...

I think a lot of the blame for their advancement can be laid at the Doctor's door. In The Daleks, he's never heard of them (which is peculiar given their later importance), and in Genesis (if I recall) Davros opines that no alien life exists outside Skaro; so it seems that the Doctor's intervention has spurred them to greater heights and altered their destiny.

This absolutely fanwank "Doctor is the centre of the universe" notion that his encounters with the Daleks have made them evil are preposterous. At what point did he encounter then and they weren't bad already? How exactly would any of his influences changed them? Almost every encounter they were a big threat fucking shit up all over the place already. This is exactly the kind of fetishism of the Doctor himself that's ruined Doctor Who. That and it being shit.

The Daleks were not created to be evil but merely to survive, Davros says so himself in Genesis. The Doctor interfering with their plans changed them by forcing them to upgrade and incorporate time travel into their design in order to fight a new enemy. Without this Time Lord interference they may never have learned of time travel and merely been content to conquer only the time they originally occupied. Its probable however that they would have learned of time travel when they needed to conquer Galifrey. One could say that its the Time Lords fault for exposing the Daleks to time travel before they needed to.

The Doctor is only nine hundred odd years old. He really can't have been everywhere and seen everything in a universe of millions of galaxies that is some 15 billion years old. I do wish the new series would get off the omniscient and omnipresent Doctor routine that has him having affected and changed just about every civilization he runs into.

I agree on the 'seen everything and done everything' idea... that needs to be dropped asap... the universe has changed due to time meddling and messups several times over the run of the show, there's no way he's seen everything yet...

I disagree on the 'nine hundred odd years old' bit... but then i've always disagreed with The Doctor's age, ever since 9 gave that stupid figure for his age... He could just be lying of course, but The Doctor was older than that in previous regenerations, and given the hints in his 7th Regeneration, it's possible he's a LOT older than anyone else considers...

I've always been a bit suspicious of some of the Doctors namedropping.

Personally I could do without the "The Doctor saves the Universe" stories.

The point I was making is that if not for the continued appearance of the Doctor over the years, its possible that the Daleks would just be a small, easily controlled regional force. Not the vast, galaxy spanning threat to all reality that they eventually became. For example, the first Dalek mention of time travel was in The Chase. And they specifically built their machine to capture the Doctor.

Even if he was nine or ten thousand years old, he still wouldn't have seen it all.

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But he behaves as if he had seen it all. I think the Doctor and the TARDIS just stick to the areas and the time periods they know well, and avoid everything that's too unfamiliar, like when you're getting older and suddenly popular music is something you can't connect to anymore.

Vicki said that school for her is one hour a week plugged into a special learning machine.

Timelords being telepaths wouldn't need machines to access the group gestalt conciousness of the Timelords... Is that the Matrix, or is the Matrix just all the dead Timelords?

Even with that to consider, Romana was fresh out of the academy at 150 laughing at the Doctor because he failed all his exams the first time through, which means that even though massive ammounts of inforomation might be dumped into a Timelord brain technologically or telepathically, there are retention issues, and questions of comprehension, and even then even Timelords certainly can't hold everything in thier minds. that they might have to pick and chose what's the most important things to know as specialists rather than generalists.

If only we hadn't fought Hitler the German army probably would have just given up, turned their guns into ploughshares and planted pretty pretty flowers everywhere...

FFS...

Maybe the Doctor should have just let the Daleks remove the Earth's core and turn our planet into a giant war machine they could use to take over the universe eh? I'm sure they were just crazy, misguided kids mucking about, and they'd have probably given up and all got nice apprenticeships if we'd just given them a chance...
And note that was just the second time he ever met them, and even taking timey wimey’ness into account they didn’t have a clue who he was, so they could hardly just be reacting to him…

The Daleks have one goal, to survive, in their eyes they are the only life form that deserves to do so, all other life forms are inferior and though some can be useful for a time, in the end extermination is the eventual outcome.

Now look what you’ve done, you’ve made me sound like a Whovian NeoCon!